Universities told not to rely just on A-levels

By John Clare, Education Editor

12:01AM GMT 06 Mar 2003

Good universities will have to admit more working-class students - and therefore fewer from middle-class backgrounds - if they hope to charge £3,000 tuition fees, Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, said yesterday.

Mr Clarke said there was "something wrong" when 48 per cent of the students at Wolverhampton came from working-class backgrounds but the proportion at Cambridge was eight per cent, at Oxford and Bristol nine per cent, at Durham 13 per cent and at Leeds 15 per cent.

"I agree with David Hart, of the National Association of Head Teachers, that this is gesture politics of the worst kind," Mr Clarke said.

However, he made clear that, once the access regulator was in place, universities such as Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford would almost certainly be told the proportions of students they must take from state schools and working-class backgrounds.

"In both health and education, targets are powerful tools," Mr Clarke said. "But there's much more work to be done on university admissions and it would be premature to set targets now. Oxford and Cambridge, though, need to work a hell of a lot harder to encourage applications from a wider range of schools."

Mr Clarke insisted he was not indulging in "social engineering". He agreed with Tony Blair that access to university should be based on merit. But there were other ways of measuring that than A-levels.

"A-levels are an important guide to educational achievement but they are not a perfect test of everything," he said.

"I'm not saying 'here's a model', but other indicators of merit and ability are essays, interviews and the Scholastic Aptitude Test used by American universities. Those are the sort of things we need to look at."

He was backed by Sir Howard Newby, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council, the body responsible for allocating university funds.

Sir Howard told the Commons education select committee that the high A-level grades obtained by pupils at independent schools did not necessarily indicate they would do better at university than their peers who obtained lower grades at state schools.

However, vice-chancellors pointed out that many universities abandoned entrance tests and interviews in the 1990s because they were said to discriminate against working-class candidates - a charge also levelled against the American SAT.

Mr Clarke admitted that none of the measures he had outlined would be as effective at widening access as improving the quality of teaching in primary schools, particularly those with high proportions of working-class pupils.

Insisting that "good teachers make a difference and good schools make a difference," he published statistics showing that 11-year-olds who failed to achieve level four in national tests in English, maths and science had little hope of passing five GCSEs at grades A* to C five years later.

"Getting level four opens the door to success in secondary school and beyond and so makes a difference to the whole of your life," he said.

Damian Green, the Tory education spokesman, said: "The root of the problem at Bristol and other universities is the Government's desire to fiddle admissions for political ends."